by Kyle Molyneux | Wed 24 Mar 2021
Digger attempts to free ship stuck in Suez Canal
The Suez Canal in Egypt is blocked by a 400m-long container ship – and an excavator is trying to dig its bow out of the shoreline. The vessel, called Ever Given and run by Taiwan-based shipping company Evergreen Marine Corp, got into difficult on Tuesday (March 23rd) and has remained stuck ever since. Some reports suggest the ship suffered a blackout, whilst others claim strong winds were to blame.
At the time of writing, an excavator was attempting to dig around the ship’s bow to release it from the earth and allow tugboats to swing the ship back to safety. That’s no easy feat, however. Built in 2018, the Ever Given container ship weighs a colossal 200,000 tonnes. It was travelling from China to Rotterdam in the Netherlands when disaster struck.
The fallout from the incident is ongoing. The 120-mile-long Suez Canal connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, and provides a passageway for oil, natural gas and various other types of cargo to travel north beyond Cairo, which sits to the west of the waterway. The Ever Given’s grounding has caused a serious traffic jam south of Suez in the Red Sea.
You can read more about the incident in the Twitter thread below.
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Main image: Facebook
